Thursday, January 2, 2014

Time to Market Pressure is Putting on the Squeeze

The beginning of the year is always a reminder of the passage of time. In 2014, I expect an acceleration of a trend to doing business faster (controlled speed). This is going to have some down stream effects that may change how technologies interact and integrate. This is especially true for processes and business process management (BPM).

Time to Detect:

Organizations will be under pressure to detect events and patterns that may imply the need to decide and act. Many organizations are not only setting programs to react with pattern detection, they are also seriously pursuing prediction and forecasting to be proactive as well. Enlightened organizations are doing scenario planning across shared processes, such as value and supply chains. Detection tends to mash up technologies such as complex events, simulation, predictive analytic formulas and business intelligence capabilities.

Organizations are going to have to balance a lot of complexity and time pressure to make good decisions. This means that processes will have to support two kinds of decision methods. The first will be initiated by someone outside the process like a process director or manager. This is what I call "on demand" decisions. This is where someone notices an opportunity or threat during the operation of a process. The second will be recognized by the process through notification, pattern detection or pre-built analytics or optimizations. Either way the premium will be on making faster decisions with emerging and complex processes.

In a world that requires quicker and more intelligent actions, intelligent processes that can enact quick actions will create clear differentiation for organizations. This puts a premium on processes that have the agility and flexibility to respond to business professionals. This means that pre-built outcome visualizations and process behavior levers, such as explicit rules will become the norm for anticipated behaviors. It also means agile process development and maintenance will be an expectation for process technologies. This is best seen in the examples of such processes in production today:

The pressure for more speed will require the integration of many technologies to serve the business in a way that delivers smart differentiation. In a era of better customer relationships and revenue generation, speed will become more important. Because of the pressure to respond in a timely fashion, there will need to bring decision making and processes closer together (BPM, Events & BI).